The Flash Season 5, Episode 14: "Cause and XS" Review

Nora has her own personal Groundhog Day.

Warning: Full spoilers for The Flash Season 5, Episode 14 below. If you need a refresher on where we left off, check out our review for Season 5, Episode 13.

If The Flash is going to do a Groundhog Day-inspired episode, it might as well be one that airs 26 years to the day since that classic Harold Ramis comedy hit theaters. Unfortunately, try as it might, this episode couldn’t replicate that film’s appeal. It failed to mine enough humor or drama out of its repetition.

Conceptually, this episode is sound enough. While Barry is off is off in the Speed Force making the Goober reach 100% Goober-ness more quickly, Nora is left as the sole speedster protecting Central City. That hasn’t worked out super well for ehr in the past, and it isn’t long before Cicada resurfaces and things quickly go south. We’ve seen what happens when Barry mucks about with time travel once or twice at a time. 52 timeline rewrites brings things to a whole new level of bad.

The Flash: "Cause and XS" Photos

The execution is where “Cause and XS” fell flat. For one thing, the whole premise required a pretty sizable suspension of disbelief. Why was Nora so dead-set against telling anyone else about her time travel dilemma? What logical reason was there for her to be so secretive, apart from the need to prolong the conflict as long as possible. The fact that Nora finally breaking down and spilling the beans was enough to immediately fix the situation makes the whole premise seem that much more flimsy. It’s never great when your core conflict hinges on a character behaving very, very stupidly.

Beyond that, this episode just didn’t take advantage of the Groundhog Day-inspired elements. We basically had three repeated scenes - Ralph’s dating advice, Cisco’s brief coffee date with Kamilla and Cicada’s attack. The fun of seeing familiar events play out over and over again with minute variations wasn’t really there. Cisco's date scene in particular wasn't really given the time it deserved in any of its many permutations.

To be fair, the writers only had so much room in which to work. Groundhog Day is a very tightly paced movie, and this episode had less than half as much room in which to work. Still, it did feel as though more could have been done with Nora’s repeated hour from Hell. Even Nora's mounting frustration and emotional breakdown never really connected as intended.

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The payoff to this latest confrontation with Cicada proved fairly mixed. On one hand, it was satisfying to see the Barry-less Team Flash put their head together and come up with a plan to outsmart Cicada where everyone’s powers came into play. On the other, the end result is basically identical to last week’s episode. Cicada gets stabbed and disappears to recover and regroup. Did this episode actually do anything to push this storyline forward?

Hopefully this episode will wind up having a larger impact on the Cicada conflict than is obvious right now. Barry’s warning to Nora at least helped end things on a more foreboding note. Will there be long-term consequences to Nora altering history 53 times in a row? Let’s hope so. Because as things stand right now, this episode seems more like filler aimed at stalling for time until plot points like Sherloque’s investigation and the Nora/Thawne alliance come to fruition.

But, hey, at least we have the big Gorilla Grodd/King Shark showdown to look forward to in a couple weeks.

Verdict

"Cause and XS" is one of the more disappointing additions to Season 5, as the premise of this episode held so much potential. But whether because of a lack of room or just an under-cooked plot, "Cause and XS" failed to replicate the charm of that beloved comedy classic. The hope is that this episode will be redeemed (if only a little) by its ongoing impact on the Arrowverse timeline, but for now it comes across as a forgettable stopping point along the way to something more interesting.